Ok, I recently got into soccer/football and there is something that is confusing next how does the European leagues works. I tried reading up on it but only got more confused.
For example, I know there is La Liga and Premier League, but do they compete each against each other for a championship like the NBA? Like does Barcelona compete against manchester(I know I might sound like an idiot, but I’m really tryna understand).
Do La Liga teams only compete against other Spanish teams?
Explain to me like I’m an idiot because I am when it comes to soccer 😂 I am American
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National leagues like the premier league, Bundesliga, La Liga, etc. are exclusive to their countries, so regularly, football clubs from differing countries do not compete against each other. However, the best teams of those leagues do compete in the champions league tournament to crown the best european football club. In addition to that, there’s the europa league, which ranks below the champions league and lets the clubs that didn’t quite qualify for the champions league compete. And of course there’s also the European Championship, having the european national teams compete every four years.
La liga only competes alone. Like spanish teams don’t compete against english teams.
However, there are a handful of competitions like the champion’s league or Euro in which the best teams from each championship compete against each other.
The best way to think about it, in my mind, is more like NCAA Basketball. Each league in Europe (English PL, German BL, Spanish La Liga, French Ligue 1, etc) is like a conference (Pac10, Big10, SEC, etc). Occasionally, they’ll play teams outside their league in friendlies early in the season as warmups for their conference/league season. Then they play the league/conference regular season. So PL will play PL games to crown the PL champion, and Germany will have their own league season, just like SEC and Big10 will have the regular season. At the end of the season, the winners of each conference/league will be put into a separate knockout tournament just for the top teams across all European leagues (called the Champions League in Europe that is kind of like the NCAA March Madness tournament). So this is when Chelsea will play Madrid and Dortmund will play Paris, much like Alabama will play Ohio State or Duke will play IU in the tournament.
The confusing part is there isn’t a post-season in European soccer. They just run the Champions League for this season on top of the NEXT year’s season. So all the teams in the CL this year were top of their domestic leagues last year. The CL is also not exclusively the champions anymore, but more the top 3-5 teams from each domestic league.
There are also domestic knockout tournaments that ALL teams in a country can play in, regardless of whether they are in the top leagues, where you get games with middle of nowhere Knottsborough playing against Liverpool in a 500 person “stadium.” It would be like putting your local rec league softball team playing against the Yankees at some highschool baseball field. But it’s AWESOME when those minnows sometimes win.